Tag: NeXT

For many years I’ve wondered if there were any NeXT systems in my home town. Search results certainly brought up mirrors at University of Brighton many years ago or promotional announcements of classic UNIX workstation vendors such as Solborne for University of Sussex. End of last summer I received a pleasant message from Luke on twitter to say one had been found sitting around in a disused room that had been locked for many years .
It Turns out such systems are still around and finally one is in my hands. Internet friends are the best! 🙂
Despite the grazed logo, system is in great condition. The status of the system is unknown due to the lack of peripherals. It’s just the slab. By the logo it appears to be a stock mono NeXTstation. I’ll leave it connected to the power before I try and power it up NeXT week!

After many years of trying to get my hands on a NeXT machine, I finally received a turbo color slab as a gift from Joshua Elasser of the OpenBSD project last week. The machine with eventually made its way to my from Portland, OR after a lengthy delay at the customs here. The machine didn’t work out of the box, first I needed to find a sync on green LCD which the Dell UltraSharp 1901FPs could, then I discovered the system was net booting despite having a 4GB ST15150N SCSI disk installed. Following the manual I re-jumpered the disk to set it to delay start which fixed the issue. The system was running OPENSTEP which was configured to be connected to other machines on a private network which caused delays booting as the daemons waited to time out. Following the Apple KB article I entered the boot prom & boot the system in single user mode to reset the root password thanks to a post on the nextcomputers forum . The system has 32MB RAM (expandable to 128MB), according to /etc/hostconfig is called murphy and the keyboard is tagged “Fuller Brush CO.”. The Config.app is broken on the system so not sure as to wipe it & restart or just replace the affected binaries. I’d like to get my hands on a daydream rom box which’ll allow me to run classic Mac OS natively on this machine, there are plans on next computers to build one from scratch & progress is being slowly made.

As I have a system running Mac OS X Tiger, I thought I’d give the NeXT icon set a try again, nearly all sites hosting the components required have now all shut down, thankfully for the Internet Archive copies were saved.
You can obtain a copy of ShapeShifter from here
I’d mirrored the eXec theme which is now unfetchable because it was available as a download from within ShapeShifter. Download, uncompress & rename eXec.guikit to eXec.guiKit before opening.
My NeXT icon set is available here
The original NeXT theme is available from here.
The NeXT icon set applied to Tiger

NeXT icon set & eXec theme

NeXT icon set & NeXT 2.0 theme

Everything seems ok on Mac OS X 10.4.11 apart from Safari which causes the original OS X skin to display on the menu bar when it’s the active application.

/* The definitions in this file are common to all processor types
running Darwin, which is the kernel for Mac OS X. Darwin is
basically a BSD user layer laid over a Mach kernel, then evolved
for many years (at NeXT) in parallel with other Unix systems. So
while the runtime is a somewhat idiosyncratic Mach-based thing,
other definitions look like they would for a BSD variant. */

/* Although NeXT ran on many different architectures, as of Jan 2001
the only supported Darwin targets are PowerPC and x86. */

/* One of Darwin's NeXT legacies is the Mach-O format, which is partly
like a.out and partly like COFF, with additional features like
multi-architecture binary support. */

it’s with some sadness that I have to announce that the Openstep.se forum is now closed. After almost four years, things have become more and more impossible
for me in terms of hosting and running a forum. So after being hacked three times, numerous hardware failures and now a severe lack of time, I have close it down.

A week ago, the forum server gave up. This server was built to last but one of the Ultrawide Scsi-III harddrives decided to take a permanent wacation. Doing that,
it also brought down the SCSI controller and damaged some of the other hardware in the server as well. The forum database is beyond repair and the backup was on
harddrive in the same server (for performance reasons this file was not pulled from the server every night since it was almost a gigabyte in size). This backup
harddrive was also dead when I got to the hosting facility.

I can’t afford to keep this as a free service and although I have recieved many a donations over the years, they does not even come close to actually cover all the
expenses I’ve had with getting new hardware, paying for bandwith, electricity, etc. The new threat with script kiddies hacking forums left, right and center
does not make it any easier and with a fulltime job, two daughters, a wife, a house and friends to look after, I have to say goodbye since buying a professional
forum software and a real server simply is out of my league.

Running the forum as a pay-for-access service is also out of the question for me, as probably also for many of you who have visited over the years.

So, on behalf of myself and Markus (mk_schmidt), I bid you farewell and extend our sincere gratitude for sticking with us over the years.
Thanks, Joacim ‘z80’ Update: The NeXT community is one that does not seem to be interested in just laying down and die. A new forum has been formed and I highly suggest you find your way there: http://www.nextcomputers.org/

I has not been possible to run OPENSTEP on Virtual PC for Mac for quiet a while (since V6), until now 🙂
The new update for VPC (v7.02) solves some issues which allows you to once again install OPENSTEP, the install process goes pretty smoothly aslong as you dont install any additional components (samba, aditional languages, documentations etc etc), otherwise the window manager will keep on panicing & restart cause of excessive DPS errors

About Me

I'm Sevan Janiyan and this is my tech blog, where I post about projects I'm working on.
I work as a UNIX systems adminstrator, providing consultancy services on a variety of platforms at Venture 37.